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Bush, Harvard Business School And the Makings of a President

ON their first day at Harvard Business School, a dean told the students of the class of 1975 that what they would learn there would prepare them less for the job they would take immediately after graduation than the job they would have in 25 years.

A quarter of a century later, one of those students is up for a big management position that has never been filled by someone with such preparation. If he gets the job, George W. Bush would be the first president with a master's degree in business administration.

And while it is not a part of his biography that he often discusses, Mr. Bush is in many ways the archetypal Harvard Business School-trained manager. As someone who went through the same training, 16 years after Mr. Bush, I find it striking how his style -- generalist, big picture, highly delegative -- is almost exactly in line with the management approach taught at Harvard.

But is that a good thing? Is a Harvard M.B.A. appropriate training for the presidency? And how much of George W. Bush, presidential candidate, is really a reflection of his Harvard years?

In his autobiography, ''A Charge To Keep'' (William Morrow & Company, 1999), Mr. Bush mentions his time at Harvard only briefly, calling it ''a turning point for me'' that taught ''the principles of capital, how it is accumulated, risked, spent, managed.''

Classmates and professors say that while the raw elements of Bush management were in place when he arrived at Harvard, business school had a significant role in melding his style.

They remember a relaxed attitude and an unusual confidence that stood out even in a class of some of America's most confident. Alumni scoff at the suggestion that Mr. Bush is not smart enough to be president -- though, of course, that is not necessarily an impartial view, given that his grades fell in the middle of the bell curve, along with most of theirs.

Mr. Bush was known as a quick study -- not a very deep thinker, but an efficient one. In class, he was more of a listener than a participant. (That may be why Mr. Bush left Harvard without having substantially improved his extemporaneous speaking abilities, though it also may be that heredity ultimately trumps business school.)

Instead, he distinguished himself more in team-oriented activities. Whether in the campuswide business simulation game or on the intramural basketball court, he was often the consensus choice to run things.

''George's leadership was not based on raw brain power,'' recalled Mitch Kurz, a classmate who now runs his own marketing consulting firm in Norwalk, Conn. ''He had an intangible quality about him, that there wasn't a problem that couldn't be solved -- not necessarily by him, but somehow.''

IN 92 years of training presidents, Harvard Business School has never trained a president of the United States. Indeed, the M.B.A. has not been widely viewed as proper preparation for a career in politics, in part because of the management failings of one of the school's best and brightest: Robert S. McNamara, the former secretary of defense. But Mr. McNamara's quantitatively driven analytical style, which led him astray in Vietnam, is actually antithetical to the more broad-based, qualitative general management taught by Harvard.

There is also a misperception -- even among many students in the school -- that Harvard's management training is applicable solely to business. It is true that a high percentage of the case studies used in its courses are corporate situations. And most students come from the private sector and return there upon graduation. But Harvard Business School training is much more about process than content; its problem-solving and decision-making methodology is easily transferable to the public sector.

In Mr. Bush's class, that point was made presciently during discussion of one of the very rare public-sector case studies, on the paper flow in the office of Edward M. Kennedy, then as now a senator from Massachusetts. Classmates said that when a student challenged the case's relevance to a business degree, the professor responded: Who knows? Someone in the class could end up as president of the United States.

From his seat in the top row, Mr. Bush -- often relied upon for humor -- raised his arms over his head in a Nixonesque victory gesture.

M.B.A.'s now in elective politics say that course work at business school -- including marketing, finance, accounting and political economy -- has become as relevant to governing as any other academic training, if not more so.

''The president,'' said Representative Chet Edwards, a Texas Democrat who graduated from the school in 1981, ''is the manager of the largest and most powerful corporation in the world.'' Of course, the public sector is different: there, popularity is a more important performance criterion than profitability, and checks and balances are not financial terms but constraints on executive authority.

From the start, Mr. Bush made a distinct impression on Section C, the group of 84 students with whom he would go through his first year of course work.

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''I was sitting in the front row, and I heard this strange noise coming from up behind me,'' Mr. Kurz recalled. ''I remember thinking, 'What the heck is that?' I turned around and there was George spitting tobacco juice into a cup.''

Under the school's forced grading curve, about 5 percent of the 800 or so students in each class will be asked to leave after the first year. Early on, almost everyone thinks it might be him or her. ''Plenty of students were scared out of their wits when they got there,'' said Rudy Winston, who taught Human Behavior and Organization to Section C that year.

But not Mr. Bush, who was 27 and had just completed his service in the Air National Guard when he arrived at Harvard. Mr. Winston remembers entering the class the first day and seeing Mr. Bush flying paper airplanes around the room. ''George felt that this environment was something he could handle,'' Mr. Winston said.

In each of the three daily, 80-minute classes at the school, one student is ''cold called'' to ''open'' with a five-minute action plan and analysis of a case study, a well-researched narrative of a real-life situation seen through an executive's eyes. A free-for-all Socratic discussion follows, with classmates either building upon or tearing apart the presentation. The stakes are high, because class participation can count for up to 50 percent of the grade -- not to mention the thrice-daily opportunity to embarrass yourself in front of your peers.

''The case method relentlessly trains you come up with solutions to problems,'' said Michael E. Porter, the Christensen Professor of Business Administration, whose first teaching assignment at Harvard was Mr. Bush's Section C class.

The back row of the amphitheater-style classroom is called the Sky Deck, and ''if the seating chart is an allegory, then George was the perfect Sky Decker,'' said Charles Braxton, a section mate who is now an energy company executive in Charlotte, N.C. ''He wanted to take it all in, hear everybody and pick his spot to make a big-picture comment.''

It was in team activities that Mr. Bush asserted himself. In the three-day, campuswide business simulation game, Section C elected Mr. Bush one of six team presidents. His 15-person ''company'' did not win, but Mr. Porter, the group's faculty supervisor, told the class that it worked best together and would have had the best long-term results.

''He was not a star academic performer here,'' said Mr. Porter, now an economic policy adviser to the Bush campaign. ''But he was very good at getting along with people and getting things done.''

There was more evidence of those abilities in the highly competitive intramural basketball league. Despite hoop skills that one teammate described as ''mediocre at best,'' Mr. Bush, at point guard, took control of a squad of more talented players.

Jim Schroer, a 6-foot-5 former college basketball standout, acknowledged having been the toughest management challenge. ''I was a prima donna. I know the rest of the guys appreciated that George was able to get through to me,'' said Mr. Schroer, now vice president of global marketing at the Ford Motor Company. ''Not too many people in my life were able to whip me into shape.''

By the mid-70's, distrust of the cold certitude of the McNamara style -- expert-oriented management by numbers -- put a premium on the consensus-building style of someone like Mr. Bush.

''Everyone was keenly aware that the model of putting the expert -- the smartest guy -- in charge was changing,'' Mr. Braxton recalled. ''George was not leading from technical expertise. He was of the new model that was not afraid of teamwork and of not knowing the answer to everything.''

MR. BUSH has not yet announced if he will attend the 25th reunion of his Harvard Business School class in late September, in the heat of the presidential campaign. If he does, he can be assured his classmates will be attentive to his comments during planned reunion classes like ''Business and Politics Along the Technological Frontier'' and ''National Economies in the Global Village.''

''We listened to him 25 years ago,'' Mr. Kurz joked. ''But the fact that he could be the leader of the free world does give him a little more credibility.''

Peter Gebhard, another Section C student who now runs a metal-finishing company in Providence, R.I., even has a possible campaign slogan ready: ''The lawyers and the generals have had their chance. Why not give an M.B.A. a shot?''

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A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2000, on Page 3003017 of the National edition with the headline: Bush, Harvard Business School And the Makings of a President. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe